I’m no longer fifty. I was no longer fifty about eighteen days ago.

At the end of my fortieth decade, I finally felt at peace in my own skin and proud at earning a perspective of seeing my world as half full, not half empty.

But who was I kidding? I used to say after turning the half century, I would count backwards as my birthdays roll forward. When I was a kid, I used to think being in your fifties was kinda “up there.”  But as a kid, you really don’t have a perspective on age. Then it’s just a short hop to turning sixty. Now that was old. I saw most women starting to look alike after they turned fifty. They styled their hair similarly, and then the dress code, chic matronly. Perhaps that was due to the change in their body shape from feminine S curves to, well, looking like an O. Am I now a member of the group I just described?

What and where my place is in this world is important. I’ve started to figure out that there is a big picture and I am creating it. My automatic pilot of getting through the week or even just one day is not important. If I stop and think about stringing all my days into weeks and weeks into months and then years, time has gotten away from me instead of me grabbing hold of the time and making something of it.

I chastise myself because with age, I have acquired a sense of urgency. As kids we lived in the moment and never really thought about tomorrow or the next school year. I admit I need to stop rushing my to-do’s and live the moments I am in now. In living with the moments, youth is eternal within you. You still have the kid in you, sans age perspective.

I have carried a unique sense of Nancy through the decades. Now that I’m fifty, I have an armload of experiences and perspectives on my world as I have come to understand. My “O” body supporting a head with seasoned thoughts topped with thinning short hair may put me a class of middle-aged women. And I’ll still be saying I turned 49 eighteen days ago.